Italian · 1908–1966
The son of a Sicilian railwayman, Vittorini taught himself English while working as a proofreader in Florence and translated Poe, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Saroyan and Lawrence into Italian at a time when the regime disapproved of all of them. His 1941 anthology Americana, with its smuggled preface, gave a generation of Italian writers a foreign model for how to write plainly about ordinary people. He wrote Conversations in Sicily in instalments in 1938 and 1939, was expelled from the Fascist Party, jailed in 1943, and joined the Milan resistance. After the war he founded Il Politecnico, quarrelled with Togliatti about whether literature should take orders from the Party, and lost. As an editor at Einaudi and Mondadori he shaped Italian publishing for two decades and turned down Il Gattopardo, a decision he never lived down.